You seem to like telling other people to "look it up," but frankly, you need a bit of that, too. Specifically, Quartz 2D Extreme. And I don't know even one single person who uses Windows with non-admin users. It's not a question of education, either. It's a question of usability.
You know, I should have mentioned Quartz 2D Extreme, the 'development' feature that isn't even enabled by default and has to be turned on by the debugger, only affects applications after it is turned on, and resets itself to off, oh, and the fact that there are lots of compatibility issues that prevent it from working properly.
I also didn't mention the performance concerns of using it as it requires double the RAM that has to be paged from System to VRAM, instead of elegantly using System RAM as VRAM as Vista does with no double overhead.
I apologize for not mentioning this, just like I didn't mention other test technology. Is there something else being tested out there we should mention?
Apple has to this date not even committed to Quartz 2D Extreme on 10.5, as they are hitting compatibility issues left and right, so it may only be enabled on new Macs and that is a 'big if and maybe' at this point due to the massive issues they are having with it.
It also doesn't help QuickDraw or QuickTime rendering technologies, and the performance of Quartz 2D without 'Extreme' is more than twice as slow as QuickDraw with the 10.4 software optimizations for QuickDraw. Making Quartz 2D less likely to be used even though it was to be the star new Graphical API for Apple. And sadly, in comparisons to a lot of other graphics technologies out there, not only from MS, but in the *nix world, Quartz 2D is outdated before it has the performance to be used like it should have been.
So, as I said before, Vista accelerates WPF, and even LEGACY GDI and GDI+ calls through the GPU, something OSX does NOT DO even for Quartz 2D, and probably will not even do in 10.5.
(If you really want me to look up the links to reference this stuff, then you are vastly out of the OSX loop, as this is a BIG topic in the development and 10.5 beta news.)
As for not knowing a person that uses Windows with non-admin users, you apparently haven't used Windows in a corporate environment or with an old school *nix or NT person setting up the computer.
However, I can agree with you completely that MS was stupid with WindowsXP to go the compatibility route instead of enforcing the NT security model even if it did break applications; they should have broke applications and forced XP users into non-admin roles by default.
MS was way to worried about the market move from Win9x to XP and the applications that were security unaware, and for that XP took quite the security beating for it.
All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.
It was never my intent to convince anyone. My intent was to provide factual information that very easily gets ignored or overlooked.
I'm sorry you don't get the WDDM of Vista, and why DirectX 10 is locked to Vista because of the features that only a WDDM driver in Vista can do. Maybe this link can help people like yourself to understand what is unique and why DirectX 10 is more than just a new revision.
You also seem quite quick to dismiss a lot of other features inside Vista that won't be available in other OSes any time in the near future, some of them are related to the WDDM and new video subsystem, but many of them are not graphically or even search relevant.
These I will leave for you to discover as they 'do matter' and MS could easily maintain their OS marketshare because of the progression of technology that will need Vista to utilize new concepts other people in the industry doesn't even see coming. I do admit a lot of Vista is not easily seen on the surface, but I also think MS kind of likes it that way.
In a way some of Vista is like the XBox 360, when the PS3 would announce a new feature, MS would send out an update and turn the feature on, as their hardware is far more extensible than the industry or Sony anticipated. Vista has a lot of tricks up its sleeve as well, and I hope people in the OSS and even over at Apple figure it out before MS continues to leapfrog every new idea that could be competition for them.
PS As for Windows changing in comparison to OSX, you are confusing the Win32 Subsystem and NT to make such a comparison. The NT Kernel has had many optimizations, but the core features and functionality has not changed very much since it was designed in 1991, which does give a bit of kudos to the Cutler design team for the extensibility of the NT design.
It still suffers from some "closed sourcedness" behavior
Well it is closed source, so that is a given.:)
However, go lookup the APIs for Desktop Search for XP and Vista, MS has made available a very rich set of APIs for not only adding custom readers and plugins for application content, but also APIs for tapping into the search features within your application as well.
If you look at the add-ins for Desktop Search, you can see other MFRS have provided several filters using these APIs so that their document formats are easily indexed and tagged as easily as plain text file or jpg that are natively handled.
Also if you look at OneNote of Outlook, you will notice that they also use the APIs for their content to be indexed, and they both using the OSes Desktop Search engine inside the application when searching for notes or Email respectively.
Desktop Search in Vista and XP even can handle advanced filters like searching audio, images, or ink for words or other cross content references, which is kind of cool. - Again see OneNote for an example of some of this, all it takes is a conversion/recognition filter and tap the APIs provided.
I have ran into the APIs several times on the public side of MSDN content, so you should be able to easily find them.
And I suggest you go and look up the 110,000 pages Google gave me when I entered "GDI+ slow", because developers have been complaining about this since it was introduced
Well anyone that knows anything about Video Cards and GDI from the past 15 years can easily answer this question for you...
Video cards started adding 2D acceleration, most notably with the IBM 8514, and with the popularity of Windows, the 2D acceleration design of most Video cards is SPECIFICALLY designed around the Windows GDI to basically make the Windows desktop as fast as possible.
GDI+ came out at a time when Video Card manufacturers were more concerned in 3D acceleration and performance, so 2D acceleration for GDI+ was never added to the 2D hardware acceleration features of most video cards. If I remember right, MS even requested that Companies like ATI and NVidia not focus on adding GDI+ 2D acceleration, as they expected Vista to come out much sooner than it did.
So why is GDI+ slow in comparison? Many of the features it offers like anti-aliasing and translucency are not in any Video cards 2D hardware acceleration feature set, which is what they use to render the pre-Vista Windows Application Drawing and desktop.
So, yes GDI+ is slower than pure GDI, and you will also find that the features of GDI+ that slow it down, when implemented on other OSes that also don't have 2D acceleration for these features, these operations on other OSes are also slow.
Again remember most Video Cards 2D acceleration set is more closely designed around Windows and GDI than Display Postscript or XWindows, so anything that goes beyond GDI features just plain sucks performance wise.
So if you take professional cards (like a Quadro) that have 2D acceleration for GDI+ 'like' features, you will find that GDI+ isn't a slowdown.
MS did screw up with GDI+, as it wasn't used like it 'could' have been, and even though it is fairly rich, MS new they would be replacing GDI and GDI+ with the new graphics API in Vista. The problem is Vista didn't make it to market until late 2006, instead of 2003/2004 as originally planned.
Vista's replacement WPF is impressive and goes far beyond anything out there, but it is very late for a lot of developers that were wanting to use GDI+ and other advanced features much earlier.
Actually, GP is correct, QuartzGL, which uses the GPU to render the desktop (not just composite) was in 10.4. It even renders font glyphs on the GPU. Not enabled by default, but I guess it should be in 10.5.
I was actually refering to Quartz Extreme, as prior it is OSX did double buffering in freaking System RAM.
However, what you and the GP seem to be missing, is that EVEN WITH Quartz Extreme it is NOT using 3D acceleration to speed up the 2D vector drawing engine. It is ONLY USING 3D TEXTURES from the GPU Via OpenGL to COMPOSE the Screen, so that the Window Textures are mapped to a Polygon and rendered with the Video Card directly via OpenGL.
This is STILL Just a BITMAP Composer, using OpenGL to store and render Textures on a simple Polygon surface for each Window.
Vista on the other hand does 3D acceleration even in the 2D GDI/GDI+ drawing by utilizing the GPU of the 3D card, and additionally for Vista and WPF fully accelerates ALL THE 2D and 3D application drawing. This means Vista is using 3D acceleration to draw Fonts faster, anti-aliasing using GPU features, etc before the application EVEN CREATES the Bitmap or Vector drawing it passes to the Composer.
This is why in Vista, even if you have an OLD video card that ONLY supports DirectX7, applications will get a performance boost even if your card is not PS 2.0 compliant and supports Vista Glass because of its need for the PS 2.0 blurring.
Even on WindowsXP WPF(Vista technology) applications are accelerated by any 3D GPU in the computer if it supports DirectX7 or newer. So Vista is using 3D to accelerate even basic GDI/GDI+ and WPF drawing operations on older 3D Video cards even when Vista does not even use the Desktop Composer(Glass/Aero) on these older cards.
Anyone that doesn't get this, load Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw with a complex drawing on Vista and time how fast the screen renders(Zoom in Out, Pan, etc), then do the same on XP and then on OSX. Vista will at the minimum be 10-20x faster in displaying the image because it uses 3D GPU features to accelerate even LEGACY applications that have NO CONCEPT of Vista.
And sadly Vista will STILL be this much faster than OSX even with 10.5 because Quartz Extreme does NO vector acceleration in hardware unless the application is already OpenGL.
Here is the best way to lay this out so people understand from both MS documentation and the current notes on Quartz Extreme in OSX 10.5 that are available.
OSX No Quartz Extreme
Quartz2D-QuickDraw/Software Rendering/Buffer/Software Rendering/Quartz Compositor/Software Rendering/Frame Buffer
Notice that Vista has Hardware Acceleration from the 3D GPU to help the application drawing, not just at the end like OSX.
Vista also doesn't double buffer like OSX does, this is because the composer can do the application buffering and since it is essential a 3D manager then it directly writes these textures on two triangular polygons to the screen for each Window. This also increases the video performance. As long as OSX has to double buffer to acheive the same tear-free results, they will not be competitive when it comes to Composer managed Gaming or 3D application performanc
Windows NT was in no way, shape, or form the first robust multiuser GUI workstation.
I never said it was... Nor was NextStep for that matter, by several years. You really need to pay attention to *nix of the 80s and something called XWindows if you believe NextStep was.
People also like to lump NextStep and OSX together far too much. There are a lot of fundamental and architectural differences between the two OSes, from the kernel all the way to the user interface paradigm.
My point about Cutler was meant to be in satire by attacking the ridculous argument 'that we should compare Jobs to MS instead of OSX to Windows'.
I don't care if Jobs vaccinated monkeys for a year in 1975, it has nothing to do with the conversation.
So please, can we get back to the 'logic' and stop ranting on hyperbolic crap that has NOTHING to do with anything?
OS X's vector graphics API? You mean NSBezierPath? That's been around since NeXTStep, which far predates Windows XP.
Almost as long as GDI from freaking windows which is the base vector graphics API. Go look it up, please.
Just because I was talking about GDI+, because it has the anti-aliasing and translucency features added in OSX, does not mean Windows didn't have a freaking vector language prior to that. In fact there is stuff from the original GDI of Windows in the 80s that is STILL not in OSX.
The compositor uses the GPU, which is 3-D acceleration. And QuartzGL, the fully 3-D rendering pipeline, was in Tiger in development form.
There is a difference between using 3D textures for window composition and actually using functions of the 3D library for accelerating the drawing inside an application and the desktop.
Vista also has a Vector composer to further speed up Vista and WPF applications, this is why you can remote desktop 4000 miles away to a Vista machine and STILL have 3D accelerated drawing on the remote screen. A Mac doesn't even have 3D accelerated drawing on screen in front of you if you are sitting at the freaking computer itself unless it is an OpenGL application.
For Mac OS X debates Steve Jobs is the relevant person. You compare Microsoft to Steve Jobs's company. So when Microsoft had multiple user accounts in 1992, I point out that Steve was at NeXT in 1989 and they had a multiuser OS.
Well then we should be even more 'logical' and properly compare Jobs to Dave Cutler that was the Windows NT Architect, and in the 80s when Steve was playing catch up to Atari and Amiga Dave was not only using but designing OSes with multi-user abilities as a core feature.
Too bad MS zealots make complete fucking assholes about themselves everytime they type a single key to prove a point against any other vendors, be it Apple, Linux, or anyone. Please kill yourself.
The majority of Vista is an indisputable clone of OS X features that Mac users have taken for granted for years, from hardware-accelerated desktop compositing to vector-based graphics APIs to non-admin user accounts to shiny two-tone plastic highlights and translucencies.
Christ, even the filesystem layout was shamelessly cloned from OS X.
I don't even know where to begin with this, but to say...
Your facts are really, really wrong.
OSX only has a bitmap composer that does nothing more than use the GPU textures for double buffering, it is NOT 3D accelerated, nor even 3D rendered. (Vista is BOTH.)
OSX's vector based graphics API is EQUIVALENT to GDI+ that has been available in Windows since 2001. Go look this up, please. Additionally, the Vectoring API of OSX is NOT EVEN close to the WPF vectoring concepts in Vista, from animation constructs to true 3D rendering and hit checking and is TRULY 3D accelerated.
Non-Admin accounts... Hmmm. Windows NT 3.1 (which is what Windows is based on, has had non-Admin accounts since 1992.) Far before Apple even moved from the 'single' user metaphor of their System software of the 90s. Old school Windows NT users have ALWAYS setup their company and user accounts in non-admin modes, just like *nix people have as well. It was WindowsXP and its use in the Home market where it became 'normal' to run under administration level, even though if anyone had any sense they would NOT let even their family members have Admin accounts on XP either. (This is NOT about MS not having the functionality, it is about end-user education that failed, hence Vista forces it.)
The FS was NOT cloned from OSX. Have you ever used anything but a freaking Mac? The only reference I assume you are referring to is MS changing the name of the "Documents and Settings" folder to "Users" to make it easier and it does borrow the name "Users" from a *nix standard that has been used for a LONG LONG time. However, there is NOTHING in this that comes from OSX.
Please do your own research, don't even believe me, and certainly stop believing the crap facts you would find in a normal Mac Site Forum.
PS There is so much to Vista that is far beyond OSX, it is really sad that Mac and other closed minded *nix users will NOT GET IT, until MS leverages these technologies to once again ensure their market dominance. Little things, like how the new Video subsystem in Vista can easily scale across multiple GPUS without SLI or Crossfire types of technology, making the new ATI multi-core GPU cards only workable on Vista without 'specific' application coding for the cards. Vista users and games will automatically just get access to the extra GPU power even on their OLD games.
(See Vista already multi-tasks GPU and GPU RAM on single core cards, much like the jump to preemptive multi-tasking CPUs had with OSes in the 90s, which to date is something no other commercial OS can do. As an example, OpenGL as OSX uses exclusively, is just now starting to take advantage of multithreaded OpenGL, which is just starting to take advantage of multiple CPUs, let alone multiple GPUs.)
No, the easier option is to make the switch to Vista now.
Then you could search your kids stuff if you wanted, but if you didn't want to treat them like a 'criminal' it is easier to just use the parental controls so you know they aren't into crap an 8 year old shouldn't get into even accidentally.
BTW, Parenting is a bit like treating your children like criminals, it is called caring for them and actually trying to protect them from perverts. (Your real name isn't Bill O'Reilly is it?)
Ok, I'm not the total Mac nerd at the company, so when I read your post, I was OMG, surely OSX isn't this stupid and insecure.
Well as it turns out, you are right, OSX is this stupid and insecure.
MS takes crap for Voice Recognition actually working well enough a sound file could prompt the computer to do something(Assuming the user doesn't have Mic cancellation turned on and has their speakers turned up all the way.)
However, if MS ever left a security hole this big, the industry would have a field day with it.
(It should be noted that Vista properly handles security on searches, in fact the Windows Desktop Search add-on for XP also works properly and doesn't allow a way to violate FS security rules like OSX does.)
I'm still somewhat of a Mac n00b, so perhaps I don't get it right now (using Tiger), but when I type in something in the search field at the top of a Finder window when I'm in a particular folder, why doesn't it just search in that folder instead of using Spotlight to search the entire computer?
Or am I missing something?
This is how searches work by default in Vista. Too bad Macs aren't easier to use.
Maybe it is time to switch to Vista?
Non Troll point of this post is... Why doesn't MS Marketing slap back at Apple on tons of crap like this instead of taking the nice guy route?
Everyone says MS is evil, too bad their marketing team isn't...
So, at the risk of sounding like a total banana; why doesn't anyone do this, or am I missing some glaringly obvious checkbox somewhere in OS X/XP/Fedora/Vista?
Vista does index offline content; however, I think it is only network resources. (And it is on by default, so you can search your network offline files no matter if you are on the network or not.)
I never tried to make removeable media marked as Offline available, but this is an interesting thought.
In today's world I think you would be better off to archive your CD/DVD contents to a large removeable HD. It is far cheaper and more reliable if you keep a mirror of the removeable drive. (And then you could "Click to Add to Index" the entire removeable drive in Vista. And bingo, contents are always available and always indexed.)
Although the "remote searching" feature isn't as complete as 10.5's, and it won't be until Longhorn Server is released.)
Actually, remote searching works quite well on Vista. In both a peer to peer and client to server environment.
Vista computers looking for network content can easily be told to search other computers on the network, and the systems use the localized index cache to return the results.
The same happens in a server environment when Windows Desktop Search is install on the Windows Server, which will be included by default in Longhorn as you note.
This also includes WindowsXP users that have Windows Desktop Search installed.
A person can easily hit their start button and type and get results from not only their computer, their server store, and even shared resources on all computers on the network.
This is just a feature MS hasn't 'trumpted', but it is there and works well.
MS just needs Apple's PR department and spin factory. I think it was Paul Smith's blog that also recently pointed out the insane Mac marketing and touting of features, and then even discounting the same features when other OSes have them.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog (Be sure to scroll down to see the Mac Switch ad, it is funny even if you are a Mac user.)
If those were "stealable" things, then MS absolutely stole them. Apple paid *and* developed something very different. MS didn't pay and directly copied Apple's work. That's why the "Windows 95=Mac 88 (or whatever the year)" phrase got so much play. MS went out of their way to make it look as much like a Mac as they could and it was still an abysmal piece of crap
MS did pay Apple, and because of the agreement with Apple to further develop desktop applications like Excel and Word for the Mac (Making them business viable), it was hard for Apple to later sue MS because of the 'liberal' agreement MS had with Apple.
This is why and how the 'look and feel' lawsuit was created, because Apple couldn't sue on any other grounds based on the agreement they had with MS for MS to develop MS Windows.
Also and FYI, Windows 1.0 - Windows 386 didn't look ANYTHING like a Mac desktop other than it had menus and scroll bars, something that went back to pre-Xerox, in fact back to the late 60s. Apple never got teeth in the lawsuit until MS produced Windows 95 which had a desktop metaphor and a included things like a desktop trashcan, which was the first version to have the look and feel merits for the lawsuit.
Ironically OS/2 and many *nix environments had also adopted this metaphor at this time, but Apple only continued their suit with MS and used the Win95 Recycle Bin as the cornerstone of their lawsuit.
As for patent hugging corportists, Apple was more sinister than MS up and until the mid 90s. Apple filled for several times the patents that MS did, on stuff they did not invent. It wasn't until MS got bit by Apple and other Patent riding companies did it push MS to start the patenting everything they could, just to protect themselves from lawsuits.
For people that think the 'look and feel' lawsuit was really valid, they should consider rethinking MS's stand on several of the XP and Vista features demoed while the products where in beta, only to have the next version of OSX implement the features almost exactly as they were presented in the MS demos far before Apple even started development on the concepts. And this includes a lot of OSX features from Desktop Search technology to Apple's Interface copy of Media Player 11 and even Apple's implementation of Time Machine.
I was hoping to create a bit of controversy so that people might actually think beyond the great Jobs, and come to a realization about the intent of his comments, while also poking SlashDot for not covering the Gates comments in a headline post.
Jobs is good at PR, but this whole DRM issue is self serving, no matter how it works out.
Here are some quotes from Business week that sum it up pretty well...
(I encourage everyone to check out the entire article.)
Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus, an ad-supported music subscription service, concurs with the view that Jobs' essay is an attempt to shift the heat from Apple to the labels. "This is a way for Steve Jobs to take the heat off the fact that he won't open up his proprietary DRM," he says. "The labels have every right to protect their content, and I don't see it as a vow of good partnership to turn the tables on the labels and tell them they should just get rid of all DRM.... He is trying to spin the controversy. More power to him as a public relations guru, but I don't see it as a viable solution to the problem. DRM provides a comfort zone for the rights holders to feel they are not simply opening up the spigot and letting all their content be distributed at a very low cost."
Forrester Research (FORR) analyst James McQuivey says that record labels are unlikely to go along with Jobs' suggestion for now. "I don't expect the record labels to move very quickly in this direction," he says. "It would be very hard for the music industry to walk away from all the lawsuits they have filed against individual consumers, some against 15-year-olds, and say digital rights management is not a big deal."
"Apple is a great partner," says one record company executive. "But to some degree it's ironic that the guy who has the most successful example of DRM at every step of the process, the one where people bought boatloads of music last Christmas, is suddenly changing his tune."
M$ Zune doesn't work on Vista either so who's blaming who?
Actually it does work on Vista, it didn't work before Vista was released, back in November, and was updated to work at the first part of December.
Are all Mac Fans so out of touch with tech news?
If MS pulled the crap Apple pulls all the time, and put out the crap software like iTunes and the horrid Quicktime they forced on people over the years, MS would have been put out of business.
Instead, people like you make excuses for Apple no matter what they screw up or do.
Want some more Kool-Aid, I hear Jobs is giving it away free in Jonestown next month...
Regardless, you say they could "call in the chips and collapse our economy?" How about we flush the chips down the crapper and collapse their economy? (because that's what would happen after we refuse to pay).
Our entire foreign policy with China is revolved around our dependence on them financially. Whether you look at the Trillions we owe them or the import/export discrepancies. China would suffer without us; however, our economy is more of a backbone of our society and would not only bankrupt, but distroy the capitalism at the foundation of the American infrastructure.
Seriously, go check out current policy issues with China and what leaders of both sides of the aisle have to say with regard to how China gets a free pass because of our mistakes, which will continue to create our greatest competition in the Global economy for the next few decades.
The hypocrisy here is ridiculous. Look at China and the rampant piracy there.
So young and so trusting uh?
Here is how China works my friend. Bush's little economic disaster has made the US borrow billions of money, guess the country we borrowed it from?
Yes, China, very good. So, when it comes to economic trade policy, how tough can you be with your own banker? Not very tough if you don't want them to call in the chips and collapse your economy.
The story is actually a lot more twisted, as the money we borrowed from China for our War and wartime tax cuts for the wealthy has created a new level of middle class in China, and thus, now in the world of energy, specifical fossil fuels, China's demand is growing very fast, and they are becoming our biggest competitor in the oil world, and this helps keep the oil prices high because the US no longer has any leverage, when China will gladly come in and buy whatever they can at the prices OPEC demands.
We aren't the big client for Oil, nor the future big client for oil, that we once were, and this is mainly because of the money the US has borrowed from China, raising their economy.
So when you are paying maybe even $5.00 a gallon at the pump, and China is stealing jobs, software, whatever they want, just think how proud you are of the Bush Administration for giving America the biggest sellout in history.
PS We need a non-corporate President to fix this crap, and I suggest looking somewhere in the party of Harry Truman.
There is such a thing as corporate morality and ethics; you might want to go back to school if you somehow missed those classes.
What you advocate would be no different than saying a person should rob banks and mug people because it would be financially more beneficial to them and their family, and that they should be supported in doing so and then defend them to the world when the people call them criminals.
Criminal and corrupt is criminal and corrupt, no matter how you try to wrap a capitalistic American Flag around it. American capitalism has ethics at the foundation of the system, it is sad that so many fiscal conservatives today forget this.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to like telling other people to "look it up," but frankly, you need a bit of that, too. Specifically, Quartz 2D Extreme. And I don't know even one single person who uses Windows with non-admin users. It's not a question of education, either. It's a question of usability.
You know, I should have mentioned Quartz 2D Extreme, the 'development' feature that isn't even enabled by default and has to be turned on by the debugger, only affects applications after it is turned on, and resets itself to off, oh, and the fact that there are lots of compatibility issues that prevent it from working properly.
I also didn't mention the performance concerns of using it as it requires double the RAM that has to be paged from System to VRAM, instead of elegantly using System RAM as VRAM as Vista does with no double overhead.
I apologize for not mentioning this, just like I didn't mention other test technology. Is there something else being tested out there we should mention?
Apple has to this date not even committed to Quartz 2D Extreme on 10.5, as they are hitting compatibility issues left and right, so it may only be enabled on new Macs and that is a 'big if and maybe' at this point due to the massive issues they are having with it.
It also doesn't help QuickDraw or QuickTime rendering technologies, and the performance of Quartz 2D without 'Extreme' is more than twice as slow as QuickDraw with the 10.4 software optimizations for QuickDraw. Making Quartz 2D less likely to be used even though it was to be the star new Graphical API for Apple. And sadly, in comparisons to a lot of other graphics technologies out there, not only from MS, but in the *nix world, Quartz 2D is outdated before it has the performance to be used like it should have been.
So, as I said before, Vista accelerates WPF, and even LEGACY GDI and GDI+ calls through the GPU, something OSX does NOT DO even for Quartz 2D, and probably will not even do in 10.5.
(If you really want me to look up the links to reference this stuff, then you are vastly out of the OSX loop, as this is a BIG topic in the development and 10.5 beta news.)
As for not knowing a person that uses Windows with non-admin users, you apparently haven't used Windows in a corporate environment or with an old school *nix or NT person setting up the computer.
However, I can agree with you completely that MS was stupid with WindowsXP to go the compatibility route instead of enforcing the NT security model even if it did break applications; they should have broke applications and forced XP users into non-admin roles by default.
MS was way to worried about the market move from Win9x to XP and the applications that were security unaware, and for that XP took quite the security beating for it.
All the other new bells and whistles in Vista are superficially different from the alternatives that are available or will soon be available, and your arguments have done little to convince me otherwise.
. aspx
It was never my intent to convince anyone. My intent was to provide factual information that very easily gets ignored or overlooked.
I'm sorry you don't get the WDDM of Vista, and why DirectX 10 is locked to Vista because of the features that only a WDDM driver in Vista can do. Maybe this link can help people like yourself to understand what is unique and why DirectX 10 is more than just a new revision.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220
You also seem quite quick to dismiss a lot of other features inside Vista that won't be available in other OSes any time in the near future, some of them are related to the WDDM and new video subsystem, but many of them are not graphically or even search relevant.
These I will leave for you to discover as they 'do matter' and MS could easily maintain their OS marketshare because of the progression of technology that will need Vista to utilize new concepts other people in the industry doesn't even see coming. I do admit a lot of Vista is not easily seen on the surface, but I also think MS kind of likes it that way.
In a way some of Vista is like the XBox 360, when the PS3 would announce a new feature, MS would send out an update and turn the feature on, as their hardware is far more extensible than the industry or Sony anticipated. Vista has a lot of tricks up its sleeve as well, and I hope people in the OSS and even over at Apple figure it out before MS continues to leapfrog every new idea that could be competition for them.
PS As for Windows changing in comparison to OSX, you are confusing the Win32 Subsystem and NT to make such a comparison. The NT Kernel has had many optimizations, but the core features and functionality has not changed very much since it was designed in 1991, which does give a bit of kudos to the Cutler design team for the extensibility of the NT design.
It still suffers from some "closed sourcedness" behavior
:)
Well it is closed source, so that is a given.
However, go lookup the APIs for Desktop Search for XP and Vista, MS has made available a very rich set of APIs for not only adding custom readers and plugins for application content, but also APIs for tapping into the search features within your application as well.
If you look at the add-ins for Desktop Search, you can see other MFRS have provided several filters using these APIs so that their document formats are easily indexed and tagged as easily as plain text file or jpg that are natively handled.
Also if you look at OneNote of Outlook, you will notice that they also use the APIs for their content to be indexed, and they both using the OSes Desktop Search engine inside the application when searching for notes or Email respectively.
Desktop Search in Vista and XP even can handle advanced filters like searching audio, images, or ink for words or other cross content references, which is kind of cool. - Again see OneNote for an example of some of this, all it takes is a conversion/recognition filter and tap the APIs provided.
I have ran into the APIs several times on the public side of MSDN content, so you should be able to easily find them.
Good Luck...
And I suggest you go and look up the 110,000 pages Google gave me when I entered "GDI+ slow", because developers have been complaining about this since it was introduced
Well anyone that knows anything about Video Cards and GDI from the past 15 years can easily answer this question for you...
Video cards started adding 2D acceleration, most notably with the IBM 8514, and with the popularity of Windows, the 2D acceleration design of most Video cards is SPECIFICALLY designed around the Windows GDI to basically make the Windows desktop as fast as possible.
GDI+ came out at a time when Video Card manufacturers were more concerned in 3D acceleration and performance, so 2D acceleration for GDI+ was never added to the 2D hardware acceleration features of most video cards. If I remember right, MS even requested that Companies like ATI and NVidia not focus on adding GDI+ 2D acceleration, as they expected Vista to come out much sooner than it did.
So why is GDI+ slow in comparison? Many of the features it offers like anti-aliasing and translucency are not in any Video cards 2D hardware acceleration feature set, which is what they use to render the pre-Vista Windows Application Drawing and desktop.
So, yes GDI+ is slower than pure GDI, and you will also find that the features of GDI+ that slow it down, when implemented on other OSes that also don't have 2D acceleration for these features, these operations on other OSes are also slow.
Again remember most Video Cards 2D acceleration set is more closely designed around Windows and GDI than Display Postscript or XWindows, so anything that goes beyond GDI features just plain sucks performance wise.
So if you take professional cards (like a Quadro) that have 2D acceleration for GDI+ 'like' features, you will find that GDI+ isn't a slowdown.
MS did screw up with GDI+, as it wasn't used like it 'could' have been, and even though it is fairly rich, MS new they would be replacing GDI and GDI+ with the new graphics API in Vista. The problem is Vista didn't make it to market until late 2006, instead of 2003/2004 as originally planned.
Vista's replacement WPF is impressive and goes far beyond anything out there, but it is very late for a lot of developers that were wanting to use GDI+ and other advanced features much earlier.
Actually, GP is correct, QuartzGL, which uses the GPU to render the desktop (not just composite) was in 10.4. It even renders font glyphs on the GPU. Not enabled by default, but I guess it should be in 10.5.
I was actually refering to Quartz Extreme, as prior it is OSX did double buffering in freaking System RAM.
However, what you and the GP seem to be missing, is that EVEN WITH Quartz Extreme it is NOT using 3D acceleration to speed up the 2D vector drawing engine. It is ONLY USING 3D TEXTURES from the GPU Via OpenGL to COMPOSE the Screen, so that the Window Textures are mapped to a Polygon and rendered with the Video Card directly via OpenGL.
This is STILL Just a BITMAP Composer, using OpenGL to store and render Textures on a simple Polygon surface for each Window.
Vista on the other hand does 3D acceleration even in the 2D GDI/GDI+ drawing by utilizing the GPU of the 3D card, and additionally for Vista and WPF fully accelerates ALL THE 2D and 3D application drawing. This means Vista is using 3D acceleration to draw Fonts faster, anti-aliasing using GPU features, etc before the application EVEN CREATES the Bitmap or Vector drawing it passes to the Composer.
This is why in Vista, even if you have an OLD video card that ONLY supports DirectX7, applications will get a performance boost even if your card is not PS 2.0 compliant and supports Vista Glass because of its need for the PS 2.0 blurring.
Even on WindowsXP WPF(Vista technology) applications are accelerated by any 3D GPU in the computer if it supports DirectX7 or newer. So Vista is using 3D to accelerate even basic GDI/GDI+ and WPF drawing operations on older 3D Video cards even when Vista does not even use the Desktop Composer(Glass/Aero) on these older cards.
Anyone that doesn't get this, load Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw with a complex drawing on Vista and time how fast the screen renders(Zoom in Out, Pan, etc), then do the same on XP and then on OSX. Vista will at the minimum be 10-20x faster in displaying the image because it uses 3D GPU features to accelerate even LEGACY applications that have NO CONCEPT of Vista.
And sadly Vista will STILL be this much faster than OSX even with 10.5 because Quartz Extreme does NO vector acceleration in hardware unless the application is already OpenGL.
Here is the best way to lay this out so people understand from both MS documentation and the current notes on Quartz Extreme in OSX 10.5 that are available.
OSX No Quartz Extreme
Quartz2D-QuickDraw/Software Rendering/Buffer/Software Rendering/Quartz Compositor/Software Rendering/Frame Buffer
OpenGL/Hardware Rendering/Buffer/Software Rendering/Quartz Compositor/Software Rendering/Frame Buffer
OSX With Quartz Extreme
Quartz2D-QuickDraw/Software Rendering/GPU Store/Hardware Rendering/Frame Buffer
OpenGL/Hardware Rendering/Surface/Hardware Rendering/Frame Buffer
Vista without DirectX 9.0 Card
GDI/GDI+/Software Rendering(Some 2D GPU)/Frame Buffer
WPF/Hardware Rendering(3D GPU)/Frame Buffer (Same on XP)
Vista with DirectX 9.0 Card (Aero/Glass/WDDM)
GDI/GDI+/Hardware Rendering(3D & 2D GPU)/Vector&Bitmap Buffer/Hardware Rendering/Composer/Frame Buffer
WPF&Vista Apps/Hardware Rendering(3D GPU)/Vector&Bitmap Buffer/Hardware Rendering/Composer/Frame Buffer
Notice that Vista has Hardware Acceleration from the 3D GPU to help the application drawing, not just at the end like OSX.
Vista also doesn't double buffer like OSX does, this is because the composer can do the application buffering and since it is essential a 3D manager then it directly writes these textures on two triangular polygons to the screen for each Window. This also increases the video performance. As long as OSX has to double buffer to acheive the same tear-free results, they will not be competitive when it comes to Composer managed Gaming or 3D application performanc
Windows NT was in no way, shape, or form the first robust multiuser GUI workstation.
I never said it was... Nor was NextStep for that matter, by several years. You really need to pay attention to *nix of the 80s and something called XWindows if you believe NextStep was.
People also like to lump NextStep and OSX together far too much. There are a lot of fundamental and architectural differences between the two OSes, from the kernel all the way to the user interface paradigm.
My point about Cutler was meant to be in satire by attacking the ridculous argument 'that we should compare Jobs to MS instead of OSX to Windows'.
I don't care if Jobs vaccinated monkeys for a year in 1975, it has nothing to do with the conversation.
So please, can we get back to the 'logic' and stop ranting on hyperbolic crap that has NOTHING to do with anything?
OS X's vector graphics API? You mean NSBezierPath? That's been around since NeXTStep, which far predates Windows XP.
Almost as long as GDI from freaking windows which is the base vector graphics API. Go look it up, please.
Just because I was talking about GDI+, because it has the anti-aliasing and translucency features added in OSX, does not mean Windows didn't have a freaking vector language prior to that. In fact there is stuff from the original GDI of Windows in the 80s that is STILL not in OSX.
The compositor uses the GPU, which is 3-D acceleration. And QuartzGL, the fully 3-D rendering pipeline, was in Tiger in development form.
There is a difference between using 3D textures for window composition and actually using functions of the 3D library for accelerating the drawing inside an application and the desktop.
Vista also has a Vector composer to further speed up Vista and WPF applications, this is why you can remote desktop 4000 miles away to a Vista machine and STILL have 3D accelerated drawing on the remote screen. A Mac doesn't even have 3D accelerated drawing on screen in front of you if you are sitting at the freaking computer itself unless it is an OpenGL application.
Understand the difference?
For Mac OS X debates Steve Jobs is the relevant person. You compare Microsoft to Steve Jobs's company. So when Microsoft had multiple user accounts in 1992, I point out that Steve was at NeXT in 1989 and they had a multiuser OS.
Well then we should be even more 'logical' and properly compare Jobs to Dave Cutler that was the Windows NT Architect, and in the 80s when Steve was playing catch up to Atari and Amiga Dave was not only using but designing OSes with multi-user abilities as a core feature.
How does someone get logic like this?
Too bad MS zealots make complete fucking assholes about themselves everytime they type a single key to prove a point against any other vendors, be it Apple, Linux, or anyone. Please kill yourself.
And I'm a zealot... Ok, time for your meds.
Yeah but Windows Desktop Search is less than a quarter as good as Spotlight is
You could convince me, name the ways it is better...
Also be sure to note how it is also better than the inherent search abilities of Vista.
The majority of Vista is an indisputable clone of OS X features that Mac users have taken for granted for years, from hardware-accelerated desktop compositing to vector-based graphics APIs to non-admin user accounts to shiny two-tone plastic highlights and translucencies.
Christ, even the filesystem layout was shamelessly cloned from OS X.
I don't even know where to begin with this, but to say...
Your facts are really, really wrong.
OSX only has a bitmap composer that does nothing more than use the GPU textures for double buffering, it is NOT 3D accelerated, nor even 3D rendered. (Vista is BOTH.)
OSX's vector based graphics API is EQUIVALENT to GDI+ that has been available in Windows since 2001. Go look this up, please. Additionally, the Vectoring API of OSX is NOT EVEN close to the WPF vectoring concepts in Vista, from animation constructs to true 3D rendering and hit checking and is TRULY 3D accelerated.
Non-Admin accounts... Hmmm. Windows NT 3.1 (which is what Windows is based on, has had non-Admin accounts since 1992.) Far before Apple even moved from the 'single' user metaphor of their System software of the 90s. Old school Windows NT users have ALWAYS setup their company and user accounts in non-admin modes, just like *nix people have as well. It was WindowsXP and its use in the Home market where it became 'normal' to run under administration level, even though if anyone had any sense they would NOT let even their family members have Admin accounts on XP either. (This is NOT about MS not having the functionality, it is about end-user education that failed, hence Vista forces it.)
The FS was NOT cloned from OSX. Have you ever used anything but a freaking Mac? The only reference I assume you are referring to is MS changing the name of the "Documents and Settings" folder to "Users" to make it easier and it does borrow the name "Users" from a *nix standard that has been used for a LONG LONG time. However, there is NOTHING in this that comes from OSX.
Please do your own research, don't even believe me, and certainly stop believing the crap facts you would find in a normal Mac Site Forum.
PS There is so much to Vista that is far beyond OSX, it is really sad that Mac and other closed minded *nix users will NOT GET IT, until MS leverages these technologies to once again ensure their market dominance. Little things, like how the new Video subsystem in Vista can easily scale across multiple GPUS without SLI or Crossfire types of technology, making the new ATI multi-core GPU cards only workable on Vista without 'specific' application coding for the cards. Vista users and games will automatically just get access to the extra GPU power even on their OLD games.
(See Vista already multi-tasks GPU and GPU RAM on single core cards, much like the jump to preemptive multi-tasking CPUs had with OSes in the 90s, which to date is something no other commercial OS can do. As an example, OpenGL as OSX uses exclusively, is just now starting to take advantage of multithreaded OpenGL, which is just starting to take advantage of multiple CPUs, let alone multiple GPUs.)
Not just by category (name, size, date, etc.), but by subcategory -- preferably as many subcategories as one wants.
Um, try Vista, you can do this type of searching, and it also has a very rich search syntax system to filter to your heart's content.
I'm supposed to treat my kids like criminals now?
No, the easier option is to make the switch to Vista now.
Then you could search your kids stuff if you wanted, but if you didn't want to treat them like a 'criminal' it is easier to just use the parental controls so you know they aren't into crap an 8 year old shouldn't get into even accidentally.
BTW, Parenting is a bit like treating your children like criminals, it is called caring for them and actually trying to protect them from perverts. (Your real name isn't Bill O'Reilly is it?)
Ok, I'm not the total Mac nerd at the company, so when I read your post, I was OMG, surely OSX isn't this stupid and insecure.
Well as it turns out, you are right, OSX is this stupid and insecure.
MS takes crap for Voice Recognition actually working well enough a sound file could prompt the computer to do something(Assuming the user doesn't have Mic cancellation turned on and has their speakers turned up all the way.)
However, if MS ever left a security hole this big, the industry would have a field day with it.
(It should be noted that Vista properly handles security on searches, in fact the Windows Desktop Search add-on for XP also works properly and doesn't allow a way to violate FS security rules like OSX does.)
I'm still somewhat of a Mac n00b, so perhaps I don't get it right now (using Tiger), but when I type in something in the search field at the top of a Finder window when I'm in a particular folder, why doesn't it just search in that folder instead of using Spotlight to search the entire computer?
Or am I missing something?
This is how searches work by default in Vista. Too bad Macs aren't easier to use.
Maybe it is time to switch to Vista?
Non Troll point of this post is...
Why doesn't MS Marketing slap back at Apple on tons of crap like this instead of taking the nice guy route?
Everyone says MS is evil, too bad their marketing team isn't...
So, at the risk of sounding like a total banana; why doesn't anyone do this, or am I missing some glaringly obvious checkbox somewhere in OS X/XP/Fedora/Vista?
Vista does index offline content; however, I think it is only network resources. (And it is on by default, so you can search your network offline files no matter if you are on the network or not.)
I never tried to make removeable media marked as Offline available, but this is an interesting thought.
In today's world I think you would be better off to archive your CD/DVD contents to a large removeable HD. It is far cheaper and more reliable if you keep a mirror of the removeable drive. (And then you could "Click to Add to Index" the entire removeable drive in Vista. And bingo, contents are always available and always indexed.)
Although the "remote searching" feature isn't as complete as 10.5's, and it won't be until Longhorn Server is released.)
Actually, remote searching works quite well on Vista. In both a peer to peer and client to server environment.
Vista computers looking for network content can easily be told to search other computers on the network, and the systems use the localized index cache to return the results.
The same happens in a server environment when Windows Desktop Search is install on the Windows Server, which will be included by default in Longhorn as you note.
This also includes WindowsXP users that have Windows Desktop Search installed.
A person can easily hit their start button and type and get results from not only their computer, their server store, and even shared resources on all computers on the network.
This is just a feature MS hasn't 'trumpted', but it is there and works well.
MS just needs Apple's PR department and spin factory. I think it was Paul Smith's blog that also recently pointed out the insane Mac marketing and touting of features, and then even discounting the same features when other OSes have them.
http://www.dasmirnov.net/blog (Be sure to scroll down to see the Mac Switch ad, it is funny even if you are a Mac user.)
If those were "stealable" things, then MS absolutely stole them. Apple paid *and* developed something very different. MS didn't pay and directly copied Apple's work. That's why the "Windows 95=Mac 88 (or whatever the year)" phrase got so much play. MS went out of their way to make it look as much like a Mac as they could and it was still an abysmal piece of crap
MS did pay Apple, and because of the agreement with Apple to further develop desktop applications like Excel and Word for the Mac (Making them business viable), it was hard for Apple to later sue MS because of the 'liberal' agreement MS had with Apple.
This is why and how the 'look and feel' lawsuit was created, because Apple couldn't sue on any other grounds based on the agreement they had with MS for MS to develop MS Windows.
Also and FYI, Windows 1.0 - Windows 386 didn't look ANYTHING like a Mac desktop other than it had menus and scroll bars, something that went back to pre-Xerox, in fact back to the late 60s. Apple never got teeth in the lawsuit until MS produced Windows 95 which had a desktop metaphor and a included things like a desktop trashcan, which was the first version to have the look and feel merits for the lawsuit.
Ironically OS/2 and many *nix environments had also adopted this metaphor at this time, but Apple only continued their suit with MS and used the Win95 Recycle Bin as the cornerstone of their lawsuit.
As for patent hugging corportists, Apple was more sinister than MS up and until the mid 90s. Apple filled for several times the patents that MS did, on stuff they did not invent. It wasn't until MS got bit by Apple and other Patent riding companies did it push MS to start the patenting everything they could, just to protect themselves from lawsuits.
For people that think the 'look and feel' lawsuit was really valid, they should consider rethinking MS's stand on several of the XP and Vista features demoed while the products where in beta, only to have the next version of OSX implement the features almost exactly as they were presented in the MS demos far before Apple even started development on the concepts. And this includes a lot of OSX features from Desktop Search technology to Apple's Interface copy of Media Player 11 and even Apple's implementation of Time Machine.
Pot meet Kettle...
I was hoping to create a bit of controversy so that people might actually think beyond the great Jobs, and come to a realization about the intent of his comments, while also poking SlashDot for not covering the Gates comments in a headline post.
b 2007/tc20070206_576721.htm?chan=technology_technol ogy+index+page_today's+top+stories
Jobs is good at PR, but this whole DRM issue is self serving, no matter how it works out.
Here are some quotes from Business week that sum it up pretty well...
-----------
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/fe
(I encourage everyone to check out the entire article.)
Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus, an ad-supported music subscription service, concurs with the view that Jobs' essay is an attempt to shift the heat from Apple to the labels. "This is a way for Steve Jobs to take the heat off the fact that he won't open up his proprietary DRM," he says. "The labels have every right to protect their content, and I don't see it as a vow of good partnership to turn the tables on the labels and tell them they should just get rid of all DRM.... He is trying to spin the controversy. More power to him as a public relations guru, but I don't see it as a viable solution to the problem. DRM provides a comfort zone for the rights holders to feel they are not simply opening up the spigot and letting all their content be distributed at a very low cost."
Forrester Research (FORR) analyst James McQuivey says that record labels are unlikely to go along with Jobs' suggestion for now. "I don't expect the record labels to move very quickly in this direction," he says. "It would be very hard for the music industry to walk away from all the lawsuits they have filed against individual consumers, some against 15-year-olds, and say digital rights management is not a big deal."
"Apple is a great partner," says one record company executive. "But to some degree it's ironic that the guy who has the most successful example of DRM at every step of the process, the one where people bought boatloads of music last Christmas, is suddenly changing his tune."
Go back to his DRM comments in December, and leave the name calling for your parents...
Jobs repeats comments Made by Gates...
And yet, we have yet to see Gates' comments posted on SlashDot...
Biased? Na, neither is Faux News...
M$ Zune doesn't work on Vista either so who's blaming who?
Actually it does work on Vista, it didn't work before Vista was released, back in November, and was updated to work at the first part of December.
Are all Mac Fans so out of touch with tech news?
If MS pulled the crap Apple pulls all the time, and put out the crap software like iTunes and the horrid Quicktime they forced on people over the years, MS would have been put out of business.
Instead, people like you make excuses for Apple no matter what they screw up or do.
Want some more Kool-Aid, I hear Jobs is giving it away free in Jonestown next month...
Regardless, you say they could "call in the chips and collapse our economy?" How about we flush the chips down the crapper and collapse their economy? (because that's what would happen after we refuse to pay).
Our entire foreign policy with China is revolved around our dependence on them financially. Whether you look at the Trillions we owe them or the import/export discrepancies. China would suffer without us; however, our economy is more of a backbone of our society and would not only bankrupt, but distroy the capitalism at the foundation of the American infrastructure.
Seriously, go check out current policy issues with China and what leaders of both sides of the aisle have to say with regard to how China gets a free pass because of our mistakes, which will continue to create our greatest competition in the Global economy for the next few decades.
The hypocrisy here is ridiculous. Look at China and the rampant piracy there.
So young and so trusting uh?
Here is how China works my friend. Bush's little economic disaster has made the US borrow billions of money, guess the country we borrowed it from?
Yes, China, very good. So, when it comes to economic trade policy, how tough can you be with your own banker? Not very tough if you don't want them to call in the chips and collapse your economy.
The story is actually a lot more twisted, as the money we borrowed from China for our War and wartime tax cuts for the wealthy has created a new level of middle class in China, and thus, now in the world of energy, specifical fossil fuels, China's demand is growing very fast, and they are becoming our biggest competitor in the oil world, and this helps keep the oil prices high because the US no longer has any leverage, when China will gladly come in and buy whatever they can at the prices OPEC demands.
We aren't the big client for Oil, nor the future big client for oil, that we once were, and this is mainly because of the money the US has borrowed from China, raising their economy.
So when you are paying maybe even $5.00 a gallon at the pump, and China is stealing jobs, software, whatever they want, just think how proud you are of the Bush Administration for giving America the biggest sellout in history.
PS We need a non-corporate President to fix this crap, and I suggest looking somewhere in the party of Harry Truman.
There is such a thing as corporate morality and ethics; you might want to go back to school if you somehow missed those classes.
What you advocate would be no different than saying a person should rob banks and mug people because it would be financially more beneficial to them and their family, and that they should be supported in doing so and then defend them to the world when the people call them criminals.
Criminal and corrupt is criminal and corrupt, no matter how you try to wrap a capitalistic American Flag around it. American capitalism has ethics at the foundation of the system, it is sad that so many fiscal conservatives today forget this.